50 Governors Sign Compact in Response To Tech Executives' Request For More CS-Savvy Kids 82
theodp writes: On Monday, a who's who of the nation's tech leaders -- organized as CEOs for CS by the tech-backed nonprofit Code.org -- issued a public challenge in a letter to 'the Governors of the United States', calling on the Govs to bring more computer science to K-12 students in their states.
On Thursday, as the National Governors Association kicked off their 2022 Summer Meeting, 50 of the nation's Governors -- many of whom are members of the Code.org-advised Govs for CS -- accepted the nation's CEOs' challenge, signing a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education, which may involve a number of strategies, including "requiring a computer science credit for high school graduation."
News of the Governors' K-12 CS education compact coincidentally came on the same day as the nation's K-12 CS teachers gathered in Chicago to kickoff the Tech Giant and Code.org-sponsored CSTA 2022 Annual Conference.
On Thursday, as the National Governors Association kicked off their 2022 Summer Meeting, 50 of the nation's Governors -- many of whom are members of the Code.org-advised Govs for CS -- accepted the nation's CEOs' challenge, signing a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education, which may involve a number of strategies, including "requiring a computer science credit for high school graduation."
News of the Governors' K-12 CS education compact coincidentally came on the same day as the nation's K-12 CS teachers gathered in Chicago to kickoff the Tech Giant and Code.org-sponsored CSTA 2022 Annual Conference.
Re:This is not the time to teach CS! (Score:4, Insightful)
While education may be one factor keeping the labor supply of software-developers down, it is not at the top of the list. The job is totally stressful, with developers constantly facing unreasonable demands AND the threat of being outsourced. On top of that, people who are intelligent and educated enough to be top-notch software developers also happen to be intelligent and educated enough to work in other fields where they enjoy better treatment AND better pay.
It makes sense that Big Tech would point at education and say "fix it fix it fix it," since they don't have to pay for that fix and it plays into the pleasing fantasy that the labor supply will become awash with well-educated candidates, thus pulling salaries down and so on. But it won't matter. Those greater-educated candidates will be educated enough to move right out of the industry the moment it becomes unpleasant.
The only ones who remain will be the real weirdos who, for utterly irrational reasons, like the activity of coding so much that they are willing to put up with all the abuse the job brings (like...me...and possibly many other readers of slashdot)
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It makes sense that Big Tech would point at education and say "fix it fix it fix it," since they don't have to pay for that fix...
Don't have to pay for it?
They caused the fucking problem in the first place!
For the last 50 years, aggressive corporate lobbying has very much gutted the middle class, and that's exactly the population of workers they now think society should produce for them! We've seen a massive amount of the wealth in this country flow to the 1%, and yeah, that means less opportunity for everyone else!
So how about you companies stop lobbying for all of the tax breaks and write-offs and limited liability, pushing the cost
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Are you a coder? I've been left alone, since I'm good at what I do. And they didn't pay me to do it, I'd do it at home. I'm taking a break from it but otherwise I'm writing code.
In the AAA game arena, sure you get beat up. Some other enviros are tough. Maybe I'm skating on blind luck, but the only pressure I've felt is during an outage. And I don't do those these days.
You're biased, and you should find a new job asap.
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Ask James Damore what happens when you denigrate other races and other genders in a high value personel environment.
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I thought flat screens were the new standard but cathode ray tubes must be making a huge comeback.
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Easy, done. Budget: $0 (Score:5, Interesting)
You want more CS-literate kids? Ask for volunteers to sit in a classroom with a laptop for an hour a day. Give them access to the Internet. Anyone who programs cool shit gets an A, anyone who doesn't gets kicked out of class.
Literally everything you need is available online for free, including university-grade education. The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school and simply have a passion for it.
Why stop there? (Score:2)
The "problem" is that they want more code monkeys to depress wages. They're not interested in better code, they want more of it. Rich people, the kind who push elected officials for more of a specific kind of employee, just throw a lot of stuff a wall to see what sticks. Quality isn't what matters, quantity is.
That and gov't subsidies. You don't get ric
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You've lost the plot my friend
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You've lost the plot my friend
What part of the GP's post made you think he's "lost the plot"? The part about cigarette burns was OTT, but as far as as I can tell the rest of what he said was pretty accurate.
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I started by wanting to write games and text adventures in BASIC, and realized I liked programming and just creating things with a computer. Those kids can start by wanting to program games
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After all, the only way you can deal with writing boring programs day-in, day-out, is if you actually love programming itself.
I don't actually love it. It was sort of fun once upon a time. But what keeps me going is the knowledge, gained from experience, that there are far, far worse ways of earning a living.
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But the reality is that when programmers go into the real world, they're not writing games.
And they're better off for that. Working as a game programmer consists of long hours for peanuts. There are many interesting, high paying software engineering jobs in aerospace, and I dont just mean defense.
Re: Easy, done. Budget: $0 (Score:2)
So? Everyone wants to program games. Not many want to actually work as a game dev once they realized that the market has made game dev long hours for medium wages, while specializing in a variety of other things is normal effort for good wages.
The wannabe game devs will either stick with it and rock, or give up and have a completely different speciality that they also like.
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including university-grade education. The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school
This is a myth. I know we love our college dropout billionaires, millionaire bedroom coders, and scrappy teen entrepreneurs, but they are far and away the exception.
See, autodidacts have a lot of problems. The most obvious being that they simply can't know what it is they don't know, so important concepts are often overlooked. Of the subjects they do happen to stumble across, it's also difficult, if not impossible, for them to properly assess their own mastery. They also have a tendency to think that to
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>>The best programmers I know are ones who didn't go to school
>This is a myth
This might surprise you to learn, but the world exists beyond the tip of your nose. And I'm here to tell you that I've met a LOT of programmers. Seriously, a lot. And the best ones I've met have been self-taught, have a passion for it, and do it because they love it.
The universe of other people's experiences and opinions that they share aren't a myth unless you think the universe consists of you and you alone...which I'm s
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Oh, okay. Clearly, uneducated programmers are the best because ... you've met a lot of programmers? You having personally met a lot of programmers, without question, trumps my decades of experience and extensive formal education. You sure put me in my place.
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You're conflating two things here: "Uneducated" programmers and "self-taught" programmers.
It's quite true that a formal education will throw a set programme of topic at the student, so they can be expected to at least know of the existence of said topics. And you can't quite expect that from self-taught programmers. But they have certainly been educated, by themselves. So they do know something. There's just no syllabus to list the topics, or a list of signatures by certified educators to show they picked
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>You having personally met a lot of programmers, without question, trumps my decades of experience and extensive formal education
1. If you've had decades of experience you're likely too old to perceive things, and that's reflected by your attitude in arguments
2. Just because the best programmers I met didn't go to school doesn't mean that the best programmers you met did or didn't.
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not sure I agree.
Of the top notch people I've worked with, they varied from PhD to no university education. One of the latter had self taught to the level that most people doing that work have PhDs.
I've also met crap programmers with PhDs, first degrees and no degrees.
Many people in programming don't have CS as a degree, so most of the algorithms and stuff is self taught anyway.
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It's true that you don't need a CS degree to be a programmer, and a CS degree shouldn't be all about programming like a lot of CS programs seem to be these days. I don't expect an engineer to be a skilled auto mechanic, and I don't expect an auto mechanic to be a skilled engineer. Neither do I expect a physician to be any good at nursing. I think we'd be much better off with a separate computer programming degree, and putting the CS back in CS.
I've always said that programming is a skill that anyone can l
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Professional programmers, however, really should have some formal training.
But in what? As you correctly point out CS isn't programming, and CS degrees (or the good ones) don't really teach programming as such. At the moment the only things that actually teach programming for its own sake are janky CS degrees and coding bootcamps.
In programming, there's a ton of learning on the job. When I arrived at my first internship, I had the mechanics of coding down: I understood the syntax and logical flow, I could g
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Hmm... that puts me on the spot. I'll put this out there. It's not particularly well thought-out, mostly just what came to mind as I was writing it. This is just a slashdot post after all. Take it for what it's worth.
A computer programming degree should be a practical degree. There will, necessarily, be some overlap with a proper CS degree. I don't want a clean line between the practical and theoretical, but that's as good as any place to start. We're also limited on time. A typical undergrad degree i
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Sorry for the slow reply, lots to think about (also insane heatwave here).
A typical undergrad degree is 120 credit hours, but we don't get to fill all of them. We need to leave room for remediation, electives, and required classes.
Doesn't sound like a lot... though I am from England and university is quite different: you sign up for a degree and do that for 3 or 4 years continuously. A lot more than 120 hours, but I'm guessing credit hours and hours spent working on the degree are different?
On the mathemati
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A lot more than 120 hours, but I'm guessing credit hours and hours spent working on the degree are different?
Yeah, the naming is very confusing. Credit hours (sometimes called 'semester hours' or just 'credits') are generally the number of hours of instruction per week. A typical course will earn you 3 credits. A student will need to take ~40 classes to satisfy the requirements for an undergrad.
We also have quarter credit hours which are worth 2/3 of a semester hour. No, really, I'm not making that up. It's used by schools that divide the academic year into three terms ... called quarters. It's a minor mirac
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There's a lot of crap online too. Dubious Stack Exchange answers, out of date documentation for even more out of date frameworks that were a bad idea even back when they were current. It's also a lot faster if you can just ask the teacher to explain something, in many cases.
Kids need help getting started too, getting motivated to put in the work. If they can steered towards something that gives immediate results and isn't too hard to understand, it can set them on the right path. I think I mentioned this be
Maths education (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the crux, there's no constituency for math education, at least in the U.S. Years of generating teachers weak in math combined with parents who never "got it". Worse, the Democrats lack of support for math came from their fear tech used in the military and large tech companies. The Republicans worry that if kids learned math then their specious arguments that ignore statistics would be worthless. They also support home-schooling which means that if the parents do not know math, their kids won't either
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The vast majority of rank and file IT and development does not require math knowledge beyond basic algebra. I'm not saying higher math education is "useless", only that jacking up the math requirements may filter many out who otherwise would do just fine in non-cutting-edge IT.
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Ain't nobody going nowhere in CS without maths.
CS? absolutely. The glorified trade school version of "CS" that so many programs are these days? Not really.
I know a lot of programmers like to fancy themselves mathematicians, but it's just that -- a fantasy. The truth is the average developer isn't going to even need so much as high school algebra in practice. They're not doing much with Boolean algebra either.
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Terrible idea (Score:4, Interesting)
"requiring a computer science credit for high school graduation."
This is a terrible idea. There are already real, fundamental problems getting high school kids through the base curriculum that generally society wants kids to have learned. This will either result in more kids failing to be awarded full academic diplomas, or will result in the definition of high school computer science being further dumbed-down to the point that it's essentially useless.
Even calling most existing high school computer programming classes 'computer science' is probably carrying it too far, when the computer programming fundamentals are really all that's taught. I don't expect high school students to manage a large code-base or to take a novel project from its initial conception through whiteboarding, division of labor, pseudocode, allocating back-end resources and dependencies, and finally actually coding it into the relevant language. The fundamentals of committing lines to a compiler and getting reasonable results back are quite important, don't get me wrong on that part, but that's simple computer programming.
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Public school is already pretty much a lost cause, in my opinion. Political squabbling has watered it all down to the point of uselessness.
People demand results, and the metric they use is high grades. After that demand filters through the political grinder all that is left as an option is grade inflation. The subject in question doesn't matter, the result is the same: high grades that mean nothing and are worth nothing.
You can get a better education for your kid through private schooling or even home sc
CS is inaccessible today (Score:1)
Compared to 70’s when computers were inaccessible. It was thought computers were the heavy liftoff the discipline needed to takeoff. IT entered a a lowered bar with lowered requirements and wages.
Security, crimes against learning how thing work and network obfuscation have done a great job islanding CS. Mathematics opened a pathway into the hallowed discipline only for algorithms to be automated into deep learning AI.
No wonder kids think AI owns the CS discipline.
Simple is all that CS could run (Score:2)
Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seriously, this.
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Indeed! It's a lot like a sports career.
Perhaps there is natural burnout after converting the same app through fad 1, then fad 2, then fad 3, etc. It's hard to stay enthusiastic in such a Sisyphean field.
The field needs Fad Cops and Parsimony Cops. Warren Buffet has hinted the investment fields is also full of fads, charlatans, change for the sake of change, etc., and part of his secret to wealth is lacking fear to say "no" to industry peer pressure.
I remember how OO became "a thing" in the mid 90's and eve
Only 50 governors? (Score:3)
The world needs ditch diggers too (Score:2)
And welders.
Every child should have a knowledge of basic metallurgy.
Bloat Industrial Complex (Score:2)
Perhaps instead we should simplify our stacks and standards. Web stacks are convoluted and bloated beyond reason. There are too many layers and components to master and debug. I can't speak for all domains, but "ordinary" CRUD takes roughly 3x the code and coding time than the 90's. We still have some around and they still do their original job just fine. But they aren't designed for newer versions of Windows and vendors stopped supporting the IDE and/or tooling.
I will agree web technology is more flexible,
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Well Intended, But Misguided... (Score:2)
The main focus should be on providing equitable access to resources like laptops (not just Chromebooks) and good internet for those interested.
The main problem is that there is just not enough teaching resources to make access to programming classes in every high school (forget K-8) without some tectonic shifts in how educators are educated, hired and paid. For the schools that can find those teachers, that's great. AP credits for college are good thing for college bound students.
Some people will think that
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I so thoroughly agree with everything you said.
You want to get more people that can be programmers, I say: More art and music. Period. They are skills that teach you to practice, to create and to work with others. More writing and reading. This teaches about communicating ideas...One advantage of this is we get more generally educated people versus just economic fodder. You know, people that actually think than just have to survive.
This, so much. The problem is that the elites don't want people who are generally well-educated, who think for themselves and are independent. If you think I'm being paranoid or unreasonable I suggest you read John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education [tripod.com]. I don't agree with everything he says, but his history lessons are illuminating.
Designed in California (Score:2)
Why dont these tech executives show potential kids how much rock star coders make.
This could be you (Score:2)
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
So many idiots doing it wrong (Score:2)
They need basic computer education first (Score:2)
Before trying to teach "CS", whatever that entails in this proposal, I want to see schools teaching kids basic computer skills. As a college instructor, I need to have students do things like download a zip file, create a folder for a project, and then unzip the zip file into that folder. In recent years, I get blank stares when talking about creating a folder. Students are used to just saving a file and it automatically goes into "My Documents" and then they can search/browse for it later. But I'm teaching
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Just more wealth inequality (Score:2)
How is public school going to teach "computer science," let alone computer literacy, to people who can't afford to have a computer in their home? Seriously, they've been charting the success of students whose parents have books in the home versus those who don't for decades.
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I recently got an older Chromebook off eBay for $40.
Including the built-in UPS!
I think the seller had 300 or so on hand. Rich school systems get new Chromebooks every few years and "recycle" the old ones.
The CS kids can install open firmware and GNU/Freedesktop/Linux no problem.
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How is public school going to teach "computer science," let alone computer literacy, to people who can't afford to have a computer in their home? Seriously, they've been charting the success of students whose parents have books in the home versus those who don't for decades.
This really isn't an issue anymore. Virtually everyone that wants a computer now has one, down to some of the poorest. You can get used ones cheap on Ebay. This isn't the 90's. The "Digital Divide" is long dead with the advent of cheap smart phones and tablets. The problem here is that an increasing number of kids do not have and don't want a PC, because they get all their digital needs from a combination of their smart phone (texting, internet, pics, music), and their game console. If you can afford an X-B
CEOs for CS Declare Victory Over Governors (Score:3)
Over at ceosforcs.com [ceosforcs.com], the CEOs for CS are celebrating that the Governors acquiesced to their K-12 CS demands after just 48 hours: "We are thrilled to see this support across the United States. There is now broad consensus that computer science should be part of the K-12 core curriculum."
It is more fundamental (Score:2)
Where education gets shit done.
Where higher education is a welcoming warm bath of challenges and knowledge, instead of an elite circlejerk aimed at forcing people into debt and profiting of them.
Where parents understand that their children need to learn to read, and to speak properly, and to be encouraged to learn, and to learn manners, which are an underrated tool to help them through education.
And where those parents actually can make a living and ha
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This probably won't happen in most states (Score:1)